


It's Not Science

by Jitty



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-17 00:43:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20612093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jitty/pseuds/Jitty
Summary: The future has come to Amestris, and things have changed. The Amestris government has fallen and been reborn while plastic and silicon become the alchemy of the new era. But science, alchemy, is still used to oppress us. The military flexes its might as the memory of its sins fades.Things have changed, but not as much as they've stayed the same.





	It's Not Science

A bomb doesn’t explode, and Mark isn’t around to see it. He’d been woken up instead, an hour and seventeen precious minutes before his alarm had gone off, by a phone call that harshly wiped away the border between the sleeping and waking worlds. What would have been a private number is exposed by some alchemical phreaking as a military extension from way within Central HQ, and even though the Colonel's orders sober him, he sleeps through every door he opens on the way, his bedroom and front door and car, all the way to an office building on the other side of town. His memory of morning leaks away as it’s formed, just as a dream.  
  
A sun bursting in white against the black bars of a vista’s frame paints the private office like a prison cell. He squints, holds his arm up to the light, and its shadow joins the other dark stripes along his face. As loud as that sun are the smug words of his commander, just a broad silhouette right now to his eyes.  
  
“Major, it’s a pleasure to finally see you! I think we’ve finally got the bastard this time.”  
  
Dotted along the room are dozens of MPs in bright blue uniforms that catch the sun. As his blindness fades and the world takes a darker and more manageable tone, other colors shine as well. The regal red of his carpet, the blackened-blue of his curtains. The desk is as plain and bald as its owner, a bureaucrat sweating and stammering with shock as he gives his statement across the room. The Major can’t recognize him, but feels like he should given the medals on his chest.  
  
It’s an ancient desk--it must have been inherited from well before the reformation, maybe before the Eastern Rebellion, back when the military and government were the same thing. Without veneer, it’s varnished to a glossy shine in contrast with the matte black plastic of the screen on its surface. Instantly, he knows what’s wrong, and he might have blanched if it weren’t for the magnified heat of the mid-morning sun through glass.  
  
“Colonel,” he greets and intentionally skips his CO’s name, “It's early.”  
  
“You’re damn right it is,” a few cocky snorts get laughed through his nose. “Early bird gets the terrorist, Major. Locke, get over here!”  
  
One of the three at the desk darts up, wide-eyed, and dashes over. “Sir!”  
  
“Private, you said you were an aspiring alchemist didn’t you?”  
  
And the salute that Mark had heard in his voice he now slams to his forehead. “Yes sir!”  
  
“Well get a good look son, because this is your future.”  
  
For a moment his eyes dash as quickly as he had before, searching for the target. The man in the stained khaki coat doesn’t catch his gaze, and it’s not until Mark rolls his eyes and subtly pulls the silver watch from his pocket that the recruit spots him, shocked, as if he were an apparition.  
  
“Mark Karlson, the Cyber Alchemist.” Recited without enthusiasm.  
  
“I- It’s an honor!” He screams, and the Colonel chortles and waves his hand and tells him to calm it down, obviously in a good mood.  
  
“Locke, brief Major Karlson on the situation, and Major, do your thing after he does, alright?”  
  
“Sir.”  
  
The Colonel steps away, toward the bureaucrat still stammering, and immediately Locke starts in on a monologue, one that Mark ignores as he steps toward the machine. As a dog, the private follows, and something spins in his heart that he can’t translate to emotion--disappointment, or some dull surprise, but the beaten down man in front of him isn’t the image of an alchemist.  
  
The sons of millionaires and slick haired prodigies are the ones in universities now. Since the public ban on alchemy books following the revolution, the knowledge has been curated so carefully that its secrets retreated back to myth for those on the streets. The ones with those words are wizards casting spells, the science of the new era, but the greasy man in front of him is not nearly so grand as the alchemists in magazines. An alchemist’s prestige feels wasted in the Major’s presence, and something sparks inside Locke, a small indignity, as if the Major did not deserve his gift.  
  
Mark chastises the MPs dusting the keyboard for prints. He calls them idiots, that they’re ruining the hardware, that the attack was remote, and how he knows is the pattern they’d seen, where only machines on the government intranet were known victims.  
  
“Do you want me to brief you, Major sir?”  
  
“Why did you join the military, private?” Mark asks dully in response, brushing aside the others at the desk. The boy, caught off guard, hesitates.  
  
“Uh, to protect people, sir, of course. To fulfill the duty I have to my country,” and the alchemist flows as a river, lazily changing its course as it wants, to place a finger over the private’s lips.  
  
“What’s your first name?”  
  
He sputters the sound through the digit still pressed against his mouth. “Jacob, sir.”  
  
“The real reason, Jacob.” He retracts his hand, and the boy spins around to hear the murmurs of conversations meters away. He turns back and lowers his voice.  
  
“I want to learn alchemy, sir, like the Colonel says. The military pays for my university.”  
  
“And why do you want to do that?”  
  
“I’d like to join a big company one day, sir. Maybe Statesoft or SecNet, or go geological and apply to one of the oil corps doing work in the Middle-East. Alchemists are always in demand.”  
  
He nods, and sighs.  
  
“You have to make yourself worth something, I guess.”

  


#

  


The nation of Amestris underwent massive civil unrest when the revelations of the Homunculus Catastrophe came to light. His grandmother told him that the cobblestone streets of Central cracked under the march of the millions that might have been fuel for a stone. Many fed the earth instead as state alchemists were deployed to combat the unrest, peacefully if possible, but inevitably with violence. The light of transmutation circles flashed and bloomed in haphazard bursts linked in time like firecrackers in a chain, and the city of lights was bathed instead in the pallid flare of weaponized science.  
  
That the tragedy had been prevented, that it had been years at that point didn’t matter. That the Fuhrer King was dead and his shadow government removed were irrelevant. The basic indignity, the notion that the soul could be used as currency stabbed so deeply into a nation’s heart that what burst out from the wound was the purest essence of pride humanity could muster. Not a haughty pride. Not the notion that they are good because others are bad. A basic pride, the core of every living being, the pride that lets them take and eat and justify it as necessary to live. The pride that screams, without compromise, “I have the right to dignity. I have the right to happiness. I have the right to live.”  
  
“I am a human being, and I am not a tool.”  
  
The Amestrian Revolution was short, and casualties were low as far as revolutions go, but the military brass, weary from the wars in their lives and unwilling for more, read the writing and willingly fell. The leaders of the movement met peacefully with the new Fuhrer King, and in days the position was dissolved, the military trimmed, a constitution signed. They would be a democracy under a parliament. The military would be retained, but as a separate branch, and with powers vastly shrunk, a glorified police with dulled teeth.  
  
The reformations lasted years after, and each time a law was inked two more were erased. Pride had quieted to a simmering fear, and the ghost of tyranny cut their powers like a growing _bonsai_. A government in shape and form, but not in scale. Money dried from federal coffers. Jobs were lost and reborn in the private sector--universities especially, once owned and maintained by the military and its state alchemist researchers, became gated to money, trading one exclusivity for another. Libraries became public with the caveat of paid entry, and many of the thinkers of the time, conveniently those wealthy enough to be educated, saw it as good. _Laissez-faire_, a phrase borrowed from the west. Live and let live, said the new breed of scientist called the economist. The market is born and screaming for life--let it breathe and it will bloom.  
  
Just like a flower, it’s only beautiful at the top.

  


#

  


“You wanna be an alchemist, Jacob? Come look at this.”  
  
The boy steps around the desk. The monitor on top is unusually flat, and the shining glare is dulled, as if its screen weren’t glass--surely someone named the Cyber Alchemist must know why, but the boy doesn’t seem nearly tech savvy enough to guess. While Locke’s staring at the screen, Mark rips the curtains closed in silent relief, and the sweat on his neck instantly cools--without the glare of the sun, the image on screen is clear.  
  
“You know what that is?”  
  
“It’s a monitor, Major, but it’s bizarre looking.”  
  
“Not that, what’s on the screen?”  
  
“Right, sir. That’s a transmutation circle. But can you even fire off a circle on a screen?”  
  
“Why not? It’s the same as anything real.”  
  
A full screen image on that little square display, bright red on black. A horned circle etched with circuitry, symbols and logical flows. The mind behind it was careful, and the entire thing is rendered in detail that won’t be too pixelated even at 480p, a problem as obscure as it is modern. The entire screen is specked with little black dots littered like dead bugs.  
  
“It’s a liquid crystal display. They’re new. Military sector only, but you’ll probably find some corp side too. Have you spotted the issue yet?” He bites his lip.  
  
“I see. I don’t understand, though.”  
  
“The outer circle, the ring of flow is interrupted,” he points to the screen, runs his finger along the pattern. The plastic bends and discolors underneath. Red pixels scream a digital noise into green and blue until his hand juts hard against a portion toward the bottom. He speaks as if chastising someone.  
  
“LCD monitors aren’t like CRTs. Every little dot you see here? That’s a pixel that’s died. Get enough clustered all together like this,” and he stabs at the screen with his nail, “you interrupt the flow enough to fire off a dud.”  
  
The Colonel’s voice booms from the side. “Which means our forensic alchemists can finally get at this guy’s technique without the whole damn thing self-destructing!” His hands grinding together, running over themselves as if he were lathering up soap, make a subtle sound Mark does his best to ignore.  
  
“I doubt they’ll understand it. Cyber alchemy is brand new, no one knows how it works yet, not 100%.”  
  
“Except you, Major?”  
  
“Well, not even me, probably.”  
  
He feels their eyes, and starts talking on reflex, a natural teacher. His nerves fall back on habit.  
  
“I can tell a few things all at once, like this here,” and he jabs at the spiral on its left side, “that’s starting a loop, telling the electrons in the machine to do something. You don’t see that sort of symbology in traditional alchemy, maybe some crude versions if you’re making lightning. This here,” he slides his finger to the top, toward an arrow, “that’s sort of a logical flow, that’s telling us that there’s an order to these commands. This isn’t the simple three-step approach of traditional transmutation: you know, ‘analysis, deconstruction, reconstruction.’ There’re very clear steps in between here, maybe even multiple transmutations happening at once. This here,” and his finger slides to the right, “this is simple destruction. We’ve seen this before; there was a famous killer way back, pre-Revolution, that used the same principle. If we’re talking self-detonation, that’s the culprit.”  
  
The bureaucrat that had come with the Colonel, he lingers at his side. Composed now, barely.  
  
“You know how lucky you are?” Mark almost spits at the man in his own lazy way--bags under bright, half-moon eyes tighten with his glare. “You’re not supposed to open weird messages. You could’ve died if the transmutation had gone off and the PSU failed bad enough--chemicals in a battery break down, who the Hell knows how it’ll react?”  
  
For a man of Mark’s lesser status, those words might have been fatal, but death shakes someone. The bald man is naked in a place where rank and pride can’t save him, where uniforms are stripped and nude human beings see themselves not as officer or citizen but as an animal. Something fragile that death can touch no matter how insulated and educated one becomes. Having come so close to that edge, titles like ‘Major’ or ‘Colonel’ become some ludicrous parody, and he understands here that humans never stop being children playing pretend.  
  
Education had stripped him of this, he thinks. Actively taught against it. The tacit elitism that comes when knowledge is value is washed away in the icy flood of death. He knew this all in the moment he had sipped his coffee and clicked that link, the moment the gears of his hard drive crunched and digital noise swallowed his screen to become a circle that the tightly knotted pit in the bottom of his colon recognized before his mind as a rogue alchemist’s merciful dud.  
  
He offers Mark a muted apology and nothing else. His response is null, nonexistent.  
  
“Major Karlson, sir,” the rookie leans over the desk. His eyes are almost cartoonishly pressed against the screen, so close his lips brush the plastic and color it in the rainbow refraction of his saliva as he speaks. “Are these notes written between the lines?”  
  
“Yes. Alchemists do that sometimes, like commenting code. As long as it’s outside the flow of energy.”  
  
“And this here, at the top,” he leans back and jabs at the screen with a boldly placed index finger, “Alchemists sometimes title their work, right? If it’s a transmutation they’re proud of? Can you read that up there?”  
  
Locke is right, he thinks. The pixel-scribbles along the border are just recognizable as text, too condensed to parse. At the top, in calligraphic script too complex for the resolution its given, something is there, and like a vision behind clouded glass it’s almost sharp enough to read.  
  
“No. I’m gonna go smoke.” He hurriedly turns from everyone, but projects his voice to an authority. “At least spare me that before I get to work, Colonel.”  
  
“Granted, Major.”  
  


#

  
‘ONE DEAD, TWO INJURED IN TRAGIC CHIMERA ATTACK’

He’d been at the scene. MPs stopped an Ishvalan teen totally fleshed up, a calloused rind as a pattern along her skin, a beautiful pattern that stretched from her nape up to blend into the little mammalian hair she had left. She wasn’t a chimera, neither of them were--that’s the first lie he notices in the headline. The mod was subtle, and decorative, and didn’t need to dig so deep as DNA to make its art.

He’d gotten there as back-up. They’d called in an alchemist even before approaching, but by the time he’d arrived on foot they’d had her accosted and pinned loosely against a wall, either arm stretched wide and a hateful, distant glare in her eyes, one that already knows how these things go. Even through the fire of Amestris’ own revolution, bitterness toward Ishval remained. The empathy for life extended only to those judged human and the sub-human sycophants to corporate-owned MPs.

A blonde girl is screaming at the group to its side, restrained loosely by one of the two MPs, and though they tune her out she’s explaining the law to police. It’s not illegal to be modded, she cries--the only thing banned is the act of modding itself. Skin mods aren’t proof of chimerism, either, and she sneers, spits, and chokes out the truth, that the law is a ruse. The second officer threatens to arrest her for civil disobedience. Mark explains on her behalf that they’re mistaken about that law as well.

“Then I’ll make something up,” he screams in frustration, half at Mark but quickly swiveled to the blonde in his grip. “Got it? So shut it.”

She screams again as they strip the Ishvalan girl, ostensibly to find transmutation circles to justify their stop. They’d asked the alchemist’s permission first, been denied. They’d gone ahead anyway. The blonde girl bulks and lunges, and cloth and skin rip apart as she doubles in size and weight. Her bleeding dermis pulled taut is surreal, he remembers. Crisp and colorless, as if a whole chicken were dried and roasted and left to drain of all hue. The autopsy revealed a transmutation circle tattooed to the roof of her mouth. It’s the only self-defense she’d had.

The second MP, the one that had held her, is flung aside and to a wall. The first loses his grip on the shirtless Ishvalan girl, who is crying something Mark can’t make out over gunshots. The MP’s hand is on his holster. Mark hears the shots before he sees. Blood on the ground, and the gunshot wounds look the same as skin she’s torn herself. A gorilla’s arm reaches, and grips his head around a grotesque and skin-stripped palm, and squeezes tight until there’s blood that isn’t hers.

It’s brief, but in a moment the revolutionary outrage lives again. The primal scream of the human heart denied dignity reaches out against injustice. Between the righteous screams that newly minted beast belches out and the gunshots that stop in her still-advancing chest, he hears in his mind the anthem of the war, a battle in this street, in microcosm. Primal humanity pushing back against the weight on its soul.

Mark had gotten to fill out an incident report and sleep in his bed, the little he could manage.

One MP was hospitalized, suffered brain damage, the other given paid leave to heal at home.

The girl who’d fought injustice had died.

At least, he thinks, the Ishvalan girl had gotten away. After she and Mark had shared a long and tense glance. After she’d knelt and wept for the woman who’d loved her, and well before Mark had called in help for the two unconscious men and the corpse they’d made. It’s an encore of every night since the underground universities went public, of every night its students wander the city. An encore of every night they’d tried to take alchemy back.

He’s a traitor.

The cigarette burning between his fingers drips its ash into a tiny grey bowl he’s set on the ground by his feet, etched with some basic alchemy. His head drips low as well, lower than his hands and knees, buried just above asphalt. The mild morning is already becoming hot, even without glass to help it along.

The bowl sitting below him is built from the pavement of the street, made of the infrastructure at the core of the city and still specked in the uniform scales of a sloppy transmutation that he’s never bothered to sand. It had been laziness at first, but he’d come to admire them with time. There’s always beauty in the unrefined, so long as it works. The poor who study outside the universities know that most of all.

The underground libraries mix their blood with the pleasure parties and body mods of the free thinkers and feelers, where alchemy itself is transmuted to human interests, its ideas pushed beyond theory to practice in a world well beyond legal. Alch-tattoos get handed out at parties with hand-printed booklets on the basics of transmutation, the essential core of how to activate a circle – they push hormones into overdrive and spit endorphins to their brain, and it’s a permanent drug built into the body, a fixture of rebellion. Others push harder, and what is human or male or female moves from border to gradient as alchemy gurus expand those mods even further in back rooms.

“It’s rebellion against stasis,” he’d been told once at a rave by a deeply modded Alch-Artist. She hadn’t gone so far as chimerism, but her slitted pupils and calloused skin gave the impression at a glance that she had. She was topless, and around either breast she’d tattoo’d a circle, ones that he’d studied intensely in academic scrutiny. “Look while you can,” she’d smirked, “I’m getting them removed soon.” She’d laughed at him when he, red faced, waved his hands and gave his excuse, and the two began talking.

“Ideas move on. People move on with them. We find new ways to be human, and to experience being human. The boundaries we think are there might be pushed, even barely, with a little effort, and we can find out if they’re there for a reason, or if we preferred they weren’t. The guys at Central HQ, they wanna put up camp, pitch a tent and rest because where we are right now’s a pretty sweet deal for them. They say we’re aberrant, but I think staying put’s the only thing that’s unnatural.

“You ask me, gun to my head, I’d even say it’s immoral.”

The books of ethics and philosophy in those libraries were texts he couldn’t find in the universities.

He’d removed the circle branded on his tongue before becoming an MP. A kid without cash couldn’t see another way to better himself beyond the limits of illegally printed books and mentors strung out on serotonin. Some buzzword was going around, “depression,” where burn-out workers from the ground-level system get the joy fried from their brain. The circles fixed it, sometimes.

That’s the cost of becoming valuable, he thinks.

Something searing meets the tip of his fingers, and he softly swears, flinches, tosses the butt to the ground in a single motion. One hand whips the air, and it still hurts, he thinks. Every time he burns himself, every time he makes the motion, it still somehow hurts. The other reaches to the floor to take the still burning butt and toss it into his makeshift mortar, where it smokes up from the ground and scatters into the air. Standing just in front of him, Locke waves a hand and wipes the smoke from his space.

“Major, sir,” and the Major rolls his downcast eyes at the formality, “the Colonel is requesting you back at the-”

“I’ll be there soon.”

“All due respect sir, he seems impatient.”

“He knows how long it takes me to smoke. Take a seat, I’ll take the heat.”

He reluctantly does--a hand rests on either knee, an uneasy tremor in his spine. Mark lifts his head as if surfacing, a diver long submerged. He brushes back his hair, and pulls the ash-filled bowl up with him.

“The transmutation circle--you asked what the text said, didn’t you?”

“Yes sir.”

He lifts the butt from its pile and takes a final drag before tossing it back inside. His eyes, distant, still focused on something so far from here, drift toward the refitted buildings across the road.

“‘Equivalent Exchange is not science.’ You can just barely make it out. Any idea what that means?” Locke blinks and cocks a brow and furrows his face.

“No. Equivalent Exchange is the foundation of alchemy. It’s at the root of science.”

“‘Conservation of Mass’ and ‘Conservation of Energy.’ Those sound pretty good, right?”

“I guess, sir?”

“Sounds exact, scientific. A lot more accurate. You think so? Makes you wonder why we’re not using those terms in classrooms. Might be that they wanna make you think the exchange of cash for knowledge is some kind of universal law. Weird then, the way the philosopher’s stone works, seems like a lot of people gave up everything for nothing.” And he sighs. “But I’m getting off topic. Even if that’s a law though, there’s really only two major _rules_ of alchemy, right? What are they?” Locke is increasingly skeptical. The question in his chest is still buried there, but bulging on his lips. He doesn’t answer, and Mark keeps speaking after a pause.

“The first rule of alchemy, the most important, is human transmutation, but the first rule chronologically is the ban on the transmutation of gold. That ban isn’t moral, but market, inspired once those wannabe chemists understood inflation. ‘Equivalent Exchange’ is a carryover from the ancient days of alchemy, back in days of feudal lords and kings. Back then, the only goal of alchemy was the pursuit of artificial gold. You had some aberrants, pursuing artificial life or immortality or whatever, but at the core of it all, alchemists weren’t scientists. They were prospectors, mining knowledge instead of rock.”

He turns to face Locke, the young boy who sold his soul for a career.

“We’d call them capitalists now. Entrepreneurs. ‘Equivalent Exchange isn’t science.’ It’s economics. Only businessmen think of the world in terms of transactions.”

As he’s speaking, a finger gently rubs along the side of his bowl, and he feels the jagged edge of scales and carved circles brush against him. A dull light from beneath the ash leaks up and out and into all the space around it. An eruption, a volcano in miniature, and as if watching time step back, ash clings and melds to the still-burning butt, which rises vertically until it’s long enough for him to pinch between forefinger and thumb. He lifts it, bites it, sucks hard on a fresh cigarette just a few centimeters short of pristine. His eyes, distant still, cling to something dark.

“Hard to question something when it’s given to you as a scientific fact. We burn bright because we’re taught we’re owed nothing. Everything given is received from our blood. We burn ourselves up, and we fall apart to ash, and we’re still asked to come back. So we do, because those things we need, a home and a hearth and a heart to reach out to us--they don’t come for free, and it’s apparently the law of the universe that they don’t. As if a seed must pay for rain to grow.

“The ones underneath, at the bottom of the pile in the military, in business, the ones for whom it must feel noble to burn up under heels for the money needed to live, they’re the ones set aflame and left to burn, and expected to pick themselves up and come back again, the best they can. Always less for it, always losing a little more of themselves. Anything else means death.”

His words are bitter like the smoke from his mouth. He takes the cigarette, stabs it in the bottom of the bowl, and tucks it gently back into the pack it came from, standing as if to leave. His gaze is here now and he sees the neon and screens only a few years old bolted to store fronts that must be hundreds more. A techno veneer that barely masks the ancient stone underneath. Even through revolution the foundation is the same.

“You’re the terrorist.” Jacob begins now, suddenly, and formality for now is forgotten as the truth bubbling in his chest finally reaches his brain. Mark glances back, shakes the wrinkles from his coat, and says nothing.

Not taking LCD panels into account had been a mistake. They were becoming more common, and as alchemical power surges through symbols etched with light, the possibility for pixels to burn and screens to fail wasn’t nonexistent. It’s a one-in-a-million fringe case that’s blown his methodology.

A check for LCD monitors, he thinks, in the software section of his payload, and the virus will sit dormant unless a CRT is in place. Or multiple circles to hedge his bets. But he grimaces--the compression is already optimized, the circle as small as it can be while keeping meaning. Any more, and the information he steals might be obscured, the data transmission garbled, and even the libraries in warehouses and sewers desperately hoping for more might not have a use.

Jacob cries out again, unsatisfied. The alchemists he’d admired, the millionaires on magazines are folded and burned like the cigarette the Major smoked, and he’s angry, as if something so deeply part of him had been attacked. “If Equivalent Exchange isn’t science, then what the Hell is alchemy?”

“At its core,” he responds, hesitating between words, “Alchemy is proof that with effort, things change. If we try, even the foundation at our feet can become something else.”

He stoops to grab the bowl he’s made, turning it over in his hands. His eyes are on the store fronts--everything new is painted on everything old, and meanwhile all the things underneath don’t change.

And he sighs, and scratches his neck, and thinks, half-defeated, that he will have to try harder.


End file.
